May Company Building, Beaux-Arts commercial building in Downtown Los Angeles, US.

The May Company Building is a Beaux-Arts commercial building in Downtown Los Angeles, California. Its facade is organized around symmetrical lines, with carved stone ornaments and decorative moldings that run across several floors.

Architect Alfred Rosenheim designed the building in the early 1900s, when Downtown Los Angeles was developing into a major retail district. It stands as one of the remaining traces of that period of rapid growth.

The store's name changed from Hamburger's to the May Company in 1925, after the May family of St. Louis bought it for $8.5 million in 1923. Its early years were marked by unusual services: a 1,000-seat auditorium, a post office, a dentist and a physician's office with an operating room. The Los Angeles Public Library occupied the third floor from 1908 to 1913.

The building is located in an active part of Downtown Los Angeles and is easy to reach by public transit. A visit pairs well with a walk through the surrounding streets, where other historic buildings from the same period are nearby.

When it opened in 1908, the store had one of the first escalators on the West Coast, along with a drug store whose soda fountain ran 80 feet long. Its basement power plant was built large enough to supply a city of 50,000, and a volunteer fire brigade of 120 men stood ready on site.